Fast Weighted Random Choice In PHP

December 10th, 2008

Sometimes you may need to randomly select items from a list so that some items are selected more frequently than others. For example, you might take a list of applications and their download counts, and randomly pick a “featured application” based on the number of downloads. There are several ways to accomplish this in PHP. […]

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How Popular Is WordPress?

December 8th, 2008

We all know that WordPress is a popular publishing platform, but how popular is it really? While I don’t know the number of active WP blogs, here’s a different yet interesting piece of statistics – a chart of the historical Google search volume for the keyword “wordpress”. (click the image to get a slightly larger […]

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Plugin Compatibility Notes

December 4th, 2008

As I write this, WordPress 2.7 is due to arrive in a few days. Now that’s very shiny and all, but there’s one thing that has always made me a bit wary about upgrading to a new version : plugin compatibility. When you have a lot of active plugins there’s always a chance that one […]

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Copying A Lot Of Discs/Flash Drives To The HDD

December 2nd, 2008

Optional Intro [skip straight to instructions] It all started in the ancient days of 5 Years Ago when I, as a poor university student, couldn’t afford a spacious 1TB hard drive. Instead I used CDs and DVDs to store and transfer large files, e.g. movies and music. Over the years, I accumulated huge stacks of […]

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